Notes From a Beginning GHC Hacker

General notes on hacking (in Windows)

Optimize your set up for build speed. Having to wait 10 minutes because you added an export to a critical module is no fun.

Use MSYS, not cygwin. MSYS is much faster.

Do not use -O to compile GHC while you are making heavy changes. Once things compile smoothly and you want to test it, compile with optimization. (on my machine, adding -O triples the compile time for the whole compiler)

If you do a 'make tags' then you can go right to the definition of a function (from any module) using alt-. in emacs